Oliver Sacks: I said earlier that there’s no one music center. And one of the things which is now apparent from brain imaging is that music can involve many different parts of the brain, special parts for the response to pitch, and to frequency, and to timbre, and to rhythm, and to melodic contour, and to harmonic and everything else. In fact you may find that much more of the brain is involved in the perception and the response to music than to language or anything else. One aspect of this is that if one does brain imaging, you can often distinguish the brains of musicians from the brains of non musicians because certain parts of the brain may become so enlarged in response to music that you can see the changes with the naked eye. You can’t say that’s the brain of a mathematician or a visual artist. You may be able to say I think that’s the brain of a musician.

The Music Instinct: Science and Song is a co-production of THIRTEEN for WNET.ORG and Mannes Productions Inc., in association with ARTE/France, NDR, Australian Broadcasting Corporation with the participation of YLE. Award-winning filmmaker Elena Mannes is writer, director. Narrator is Audra
MacDonald. Executive Producers are Elena Mannes and Margaret Smilow. Available in HD. Major funding for this program provided by the National Science Foundation, Mary Rodgers Guettel, NAMM FOUNDATION, National Endowment for the Arts, Rita and Fritz Markus, The Vital Projects Fund, the Irving Harris Foundation, Sono and Victor Elmaleh, Thea Petschek Iervolino and public television viewers.